Rep. Todd Akin's (R-Town and Country) opposition to human rights abuses in China has settled on an unlikely target: the St. Louis Galleria, which plans to host an exhibit later this year featuring cadavers shipped from the communist regime.  He filed legislation on Capitol Hill this week that could prevent China from sending bodies meant for commercial display to the U.S.

Akin's current bill is similar to one he filed in 2008 at the urging of a former Chinese political prisoner, Harry Wu, who later formed an advocacy group in Washington, the Laogai Research Foundation.

A spokeswoman for the organization said that exhibits that display the body are fueling a demand in China for human remains — a demand some fear the country could be fulfilling through unscrupulous means.

"These bodies may in fact be coming from executed prisoners, which is of course a massive concern for our organization and anybody concerned with human dignity," the foundation's Lindsey Purdy said.  (Read more from stltoday.com)

Noted human-rights activist Harry Wu gave the keynote address at an international conference, held at Berkeley, on combating illegal trafficking in human organs and tissues. The May 5-7 conference was sponsored by the campus's doctoral program in medical anthropology and by Organs Watch, a university-affiliated medical human rights and documentation project concerned with illegal organs procurement via global traffic in organs and tissues.  Listen to Wu's keynote here.

China's hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been expanded to include Tibetans, "house church" Christians and Muslim Uighurs, human rights activists said Monday.

Although the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners has been documented as early as 1992 by Chinese dissident Harry Wu's Laogai Research Foundation, it was not until 2006 that the Epoch Times, a Falun Gong publication, accused the Chinese government of using its adherents for the practice. (Read more from the Washington Times)

China's ruling Communist Party has declined in recent years to make public the number of people it executes every year, in spite of challenges from international human rights groups.

According to Harry Wu, founder of the U.S.-based Laogai Foundation, which produced evidence of extensive organ harvesting from executed prisoners, recent years have seen executions transformed from a spectator sport into a state secret, carried out behind closed doors.

"The Chinese Communist Party in the past always regarded executions as positive news," Wu said. "The suppression of evil elements was regarded as a cause for celebration."

"They would always execute a bunch of people on the eve of a major festival as a public spectacle," Wu said. "This was seen as something the ordinary people like to see, and as a basic method of keeping down the number of criminal offences and counterrevolutionary acts."

Chinese courts then moved to putting up a notice for a single day, following new guidelines in 2002, Wu said.

"Then they stopped even putting those up. They don't even inform the relatives now," he said. "And now they no longer announce the numbers of those who have been killed."  (Read more at RFA)